Google had their Summer of Code, I just had my...

Weekend... Of... CODE

(Say it like The Muppet Show's "Pigs In Space.")

It's been kind of nice, really. First of all, I enhanced the way gig images are viewed over at the Sons Of Nothing site. Instead of images opening up in a new browser window when you clicked on a thumbnail, the images will open up "inside" the site along with some handy "next image" and "previous image" navigation.

It wasn't hard. Just create a new template for the full-size image page and give it some meta data about the next and previous images in the set. Done.

Perl, mod_perl, and Template Toolkit just rock... like Sons Of Nothing rocks... but different.

For example, check out this recently-posted rare glimpse of me from our September jaunt to Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

Secondly, Iodynamics is currently involved in a project for a client that involves gluing a bunch of facilities together within one website including auctions, weblogs, news articles, file downloads, and more. Call in the next 20 minutes and you'll also get this handy dandy nosehair trimmer.

Anyway, the original project specification had us doing everything in PHP - not our first choice for anything. We weren't too worried about spending too much time writing PHP code because our plan was to use "off-the-shelf" components or applications and glue them together into one seamless website.

It never quite works that way, does it?

The "RSS feed" we were supposed to be using for the news articles turned out to be an XML format which borrowed haphazardly from RSS, but is completely different, thereby requiring some ground-up parser development.

The file download repository is specific enough, we hadn't been able to find anything that would do the trick admirably enough.

Oh, did I mention the client was seriously hoping to have it all done last week?

Fortunately, the client succumbed and said, "Go ahead and do it in Perl." Whatever it takes, just get it done quick. Man, after searching for something akin to CPAN's XML::Simple for PHP, it was so refreshing to be able to just use versatile Perl modules like XML::Simple, LWP::UserAgent, DBI, and others.

I was able to crank out all kinds of magic to do the news articles and the file download repository in an amazingly small amount of code and still maintain a strict separation of concerns (i.e. MVC) -- something that you have to work really hard to do when programming with PHP.